Saša Hassan presented recent launches of Machine Translation on the eBay site for various locales, e.g. Russian and Latin American markets, which enables buyers to shop in their native languages and fosters overall cross-border trade. The core MT stack is based on Moses and is embedded in a larger orchestration layer. This presentation is a part of the MosesCore project that encourages the development and usage of open source machine translation tools, notably the Moses statistical MT toolkit. 

MosesCore is supported by the European Commission Grant Number 288487 under the 7th Framework Programme. 
 

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1. Machine Translation at
Saša Hasan
eBay Machine Translation Applied Science
TAUS MT Showcase
Vancouver, BC, Oct 29, 2014

2. Outline
– Introduction to eBay
– MT at eBay:
• Architectural overview
• Quality assurance
– Conclusion
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3. Who We Are
– One of the world’s largest online marketplaces
– Connect buyers and sellers globally
– 152+M active users
– 800+M total listings (80% new)
– Enabled Commerce Volume in Q3 2014 was $63 billion
– Cross-border trade grew 27%, representing $14 billion of ECV
– Technical scale:
• 150PB of data storage (Hadoop)
• 10k nodes / 150+k cores
• Log aggregation: 8-10TB per day
• 300+M user queries per day
• 8.6B pages served per day
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4. Cross-Border Trade (CBT)
Source: Modern Spice Routes – PayPal report
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5. Cross-Border Trade (CBT)
Source: Modern Spice Routes – PayPal report
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RU
LATAM
FRITES
DE
PT

6. Transaction Flow
ebay.com
in English
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ebay.com
in Russian

7. Primary use cases
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8. Primary use cases
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Query Translation
(RUEN)
= red shoes

9. Primary use cases
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Query Translation
(RUEN)
= red shoes
Item Title
Translation
(ENRU)

10. Primary use cases (cont’d)
Item Description
Translation
(EN RU, on
demand)
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11. Supported languages
Realtime
Near-Realtime
On-demand
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– QT: Query Translation
– ITT: Item Title Translation
– IDT: Item Description Translation
– M2MT: Member-to-Member Translation
Language QT ITT IDT M2MT
RU↔EN eBay eBay Bing Bing
PT↔EN eBay eBay Bing Bing
ES↔EN eBay eBay Bing Bing
FR↔EN eBay eBay … …
IT↔EN eBay … … …
DE↔EN … … …
DE↔EN
EN↔DE … …
Query
Language
Inventory
Language

12. Architecture
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13. Architecture
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14. Teams
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MT Engineering
 Orchestration Layer
 Deployment
 Monitoring
MT Science
 Data acquisition
 Engine training & Analytics
 Quality improvements
L10N / MTLS
 Human translations
 Post-Editing
 Evaluation & Feedback

15. Technology stack
– Orchestration layer (Java)
– Core MT based on Moses (XMLRPC):
• Phrase-based decoder w/ out-of-the-box features
• Tuned heavily for translation throughput:
– 20 msec per user search query (online, “realtime”)
– <500 msec per item title (offline, “near-realtime”)
– Caching (MongoDB)
– Translated queries:
• 72M per day
• 99%-ile at 19 msec
– Translated titles:
• 30M per day
• 99%-ile at 100 msec
Moses
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16. Technology stack (cont’d)
– In-domain data (Teradata):
• Item titles sampled from data warehouse
• Relevant categories based on #impressions
– User behavioral data (Hadoop):
• Analytics based on click-through statistics
and other user engagement
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17. Quality assurance
– Post-edited eBay-specific data sets for training (100+k)
– Human-translated eBay-specific data sets for tuning and testing (1+k)
FR
PT PT
PT
– Automatic evaluations:
• Search recall,
• Brand names preservation, and
• English query preservation (e.g. for XEN)
• Out-Of-Vocabulary rate, position-independent error rate (PER), BLEU
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Query MT
vitesse speed
duplo double
rei king
Query MT
e cigarette and cigarette
cobra snake
car because
сумки из
натуральной кожи
#search
results
bags of genuine leather 161
genuine leather bag 47,097
FR
PT
RU

18. Quality assurance (cont’d)
ENPT
Item title Authentic Coach Ladies Purse MEDIUM
Bing translation Autêntico treinador senhoras bolsa médio
eBay translation Authentic Coach Senhoras Bolsa Médio
– Human evaluations:
• Acceptability (QT), 1-5 ratings (ITT), internal release criteria
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ENPT
Item title Triumph Stag Wind Deflector
Bing translation Defletor de vento veado de triunfo
eBay translation Triumph Stag defletor do vento

19. Summary
– eBay Machine Translation:
• Moses core
• Complex orchestration layer
• Optimized for speed & quality
• eBay-specific evaluation criteria
– Coordination among 3 teams:
• MT Engineering
• MT Applied Science
• Localization, MT language specialists
– Analytics and monitoring:
• User behavioral data
• System health
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20. Discussion
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